Bring Your Art Into the Studio

1Why bring art in as separate parts

A puppet moves because its pieces move independently: an arm swings without dragging the whole body, a jaw drops without the eyes sliding. To get that, each part has to sit on its own layer. In the Animation studio, a layer that holds a picture is an Image row, so a two-arm, one-head character usually ends up as several Image rows stacked together. In effect you cut the character apart at its joints, one image per piece, then reassemble it from those pieces.

2Add your first Image row

Along the add-row bar you will find buttons for Art, Image, Tween, Vector, Character, and more. Click Image to add a fresh picture layer to your scene. It arrives empty with a default name like Image 1, and you point it at a file next. You will add one of these rows for every part of your character.

3Import the picture with Import image

With the Image row selected, open the Image source panel. Click Import image and choose the file for that part. The picture drops onto the stage on that row, and from here it behaves like any other layer: it can be moved, scaled, and eventually rigged. Repeat this for each part, one file per Image row.

4Fit, Fill, or Stretch

Once a picture is in, the Image source panel gives you three sizing toggles: Fit, Fill, and Stretch. Fit shows the whole image inside its frame without cropping, Fill covers the frame and may crop the edges, and Stretch forces the picture to the frame shape even if that squishes it. For a puppet part that you cut out yourself, Fit is almost always the right call because it keeps your proportions honest.

5Place each part on the stage

A freshly imported part usually lands dead centre, so you need to slide it into position. In the Tool Options bar under the Layer tools, use Translate to set its Pos X and Pos Y, Scale to resize it, and Rotate to set its Angle. Nudge the forearm up to the elbow, the hand up to the wrist, and so on, until the whole figure lines up.

6Stack the rows in depth order

The order of your Image rows is the front-to-back order on screen: a row higher in the list sits in front of the rows below it. So a character's near arm goes above the torso, the torso above the far arm, and the far arm at the back. Drag the rows up and down until the stacking reads correctly, with nothing poking through that should be hidden.

7The one honest catch: no automatic layered import

If you are used to a desktop animation app, you may expect to drop in one layered file and have it explode into ready-made parts. FoundryInk does not do that yet. There is no automatic layered-file import that splits a document into a rig for you. The real workflow is the one above: export each part separately and bring it in as its own Image row. It is a few more clicks up front, and it means you always know exactly what every row holds.

8Turn a part into a puppet with Rig this image

A plain Image row can slide, scale, and rotate, but it cannot bend. To make a part bendy, select its row and click Rig this image. This adds a posable bone-mesh copy of the picture: FoundryInk lays an invisible mesh over your art so that when a bone moves, the pixels stretch and follow. Your original picture stays intact underneath, so nothing is destroyed.

9Open the rigger and find Rig mode

Rigging happens in a dedicated rigger with three modes shown in the banner: Rig mode, Animate mode, and Test mode. Start in Rig mode. This is where you edit the rest skeleton, the pose your character sits in before any animation, and crucially, nothing you do here touches the timeline. It is the safe workshop where you build the bones.

10What the bone-mesh copy actually gives you

Once rigged, the part carries a mesh that bones can deform. When you later add a bone down the middle of an arm and bend it, the mesh stretches smoothly around the joint instead of snapping like a stiff cutout. This is the difference between a cheap paper puppet and one that feels like it has muscle. The mesh is generated for you, so you do not paint or draw it by hand.

11Rig each part, or bind parts to a shared skeleton

You have two honest choices. You can rig parts individually so each one bends on its own, which is great for a face or a bendy tail. Or you can build one skeleton and attach whole parts to single bones, so a hand rides its wrist bone rigidly. The whole-layer approach uses Bind to bone, whose options are None plus the names of your bones. Rigid parts riding one bone each is the classic, sturdy cut-out puppet.

12Sanity-check in Test mode

Before you commit to animating, switch to Test mode and drag your bones around. Nothing you do here is saved, so it is the perfect place to find problems: a hand that detaches from a sleeve, a face that pinches, an arm that bends the wrong way. Drag every joint through its full range, watch where the mesh strains, then go back to Rig mode to fix it.

13What good imported art looks like

A well-imported character reads as one figure, not a pile of clip art. The parts overlap cleanly at every joint, the row order matches the body's depth so nothing pokes through, and the pieces that need to bend carry a mesh while the stiff props do not. When you drag a bone, the whole limb follows like it belongs to a single creature. That is the finish line for this stage.

14Where to go from here

Your art is in, placed, stacked, and rigged, which is the heavy lifting done. From here the fun begins: give the face a set of switchable mouth shapes so it can talk, add smart controls so limbs pose in one drag, and put spring in the hair and cloak. The next few pages in this course build directly on the puppet you just made, so keep this scene open.

Import and rig questions